Wing Zone

Wings and the Super Bowl go together. It’s just a fact of life. For the last five or six years, I have slaved over a deep fryer for hours making wings for my friends on the day of the game. Every year, I’d come up with a new sauce or way to cook them. Last year, I skipped the deep fryer all together and went for baked wings. This year, I just wasn’t in the mood. I still wanted wings and have been craving them for days. My two choices were to make a trip to Kroger for wings and oil or let the professionals do all the work.

My favorite wing place, by far has always been Buffalo Wild Wings. It’s the one chain I don’t mind telling you that I love. When the company opened their first store in the Peoria area, I spent three or four nights a week there. I worked second shift and my buddies and I would hit B-Dubs after work for drinks and wings. Most Tuesday’s, our orders were waiting for us when we got there.

Ten hot wings from Wing Zone in Lansing

It pretty much goes without saying, I compare all wing places to Buffalo Wild Wings. Since it is Super Sunday, I had no desire to fight the crowds at the East Lansing B-Dubs. As far as local places go, I really love Barley’s wings and considered just going there, but ultimately, I decided on Wing Zone. I had seen signs around town and heard good things, so that’s what we decided to try.

Wing Zone is on Morgan Street which is in the Frandor Shopping Center. It’s a very tiny shop that only does carry-out and delivery. We had planned on carry-out anyway, but it was a little surprising when we showed up and there really wasn’t any place to wait after we placed our order.

As the name suggests, the feature item on the menu is wings. Sure, they have other options like burgers, salads, chicken sandwiches, and shrimp. All we wanted was wings. There are several ordering options and a few combos that include fries.

There are 25 different sauces to choose from. J and I don’t agree on how hot wings should be, so we each got 10 in our flavor of choice. I chose hot which is right in the middle on their heat chart. There are two below it and two above it. J got honey BBQ. She prefers the BBQ wings over the hot sauce wings. We passed on fries since we had enough junk food at home. The guy taking our order told us to come back in eight to ten minutes. Since there was no place to wait at the store, we ran across the street to Speedway to get a couple pops. By the time we got back, our wings were ready.

Wing Zone on Morgan Street in Lansing.

We got home and dug in. The wings are very comparable to Buffalo Wild Wings. They have a nice crunch to them which is the step so many bars and restaurants skip when they try to make their own wings. Wing Zone offers the choice of original or boneless wings for the same price. I still prefer the original. The boneless may be easier to eat, but they always taste like chicken strips dipped in hot sauce. There’s nothing like bone-in wings.

The hot sauce wasn’t all that hot. It was actually kind of mild. I could have went up to the “hotter” sauce and probably been ok. I polished off my ten wings fairly quickly. J looked at me and said it wasn’t a race. By the time I was halfway done, J was putting down her first bone. She ended up giving me three of hers which is par for the course.

Wing Zone was good. Our total for 20 wings was about fourteen bucks. Wing Zone is a chain that was founded on the University of Florida in the early nineties. There are about 100 franchises nationwide, but this Lansing location is the only in Michigan. The wings were good. Like I already said, they were comparable to Buffalo Wild Wings. They weren’t quite the same, but close enough that I could eat twenty and not flinch.